The chair, as if dying of heart-disease, came to an end amid a peculiarly fine patch of bluebells. There she leaned, like a derelict run aground in shallow water. Constance moved a stage nearer.
‘She won’t do it! She’s not got power enough,’ said the keeper.
‘She’s done it before,’ said Clifford.
‘I’m doubtin’ she won’t do it this trip, though. You’d best let me push her, Sir!’
Clifford did not reply. He began running his engine fast again, making a weird noise that must have gone to the hearts of the wild creatures of the wood. Then he put the motor into gear, with a jerk.
‘You’ll rip her guts out,’ murmured the keeper.
But, the chair charged in a sick swerve sideways.
‘Clifford!’ cried Constance, rushing forward.
But the keeper had seized the chair by the rail. Clifford, however, putting on all his pressure, managed to steer into the riding, and with a strange tearing noise the chair was fighting the hill. Parkin pushed steadily from behind, and the poor thing laboured up.
‘You see she’s doing it!’ said Clifford in triumph, looking for a second over his shoulder. There he saw Parkin’s red face.
‘Are you pushing?’
‘Ay, she won’t do it without.’
‘Leave her alone. I asked you not—’
‘She won’t do it by herself.’
‘Let her try —’ commanded Clifford. ‘She’s got to do it.’
The keeper dropped a pace into the rear, and turned back for his coat and gun.
The chair immediately seemed to choke. Clifford, seated a prisoner, became white with anger. He fought with the machine. Strange noises came out of her. She gave little lurches. Then she could move no more. Strange noises came out of the poor thing. Clifford moved little handles. But she did not budge. He stopped the engine.
‘Ah, the cursed thing!’ he said, glancing round.
Constance was there, seated on the banks looking at the wrecked and trampled bluebells. The keeper strode up with his coat and gun. Flossie stood with her nose in the air, wondering. And Clifford asked Parkin to look at something or other in the engine.
Connie, who knew she knew nothing about motors, also knew she’d better say nothing. Parkin lay down on his stomach, his feet wide apart, and poked in behind the wheel in a busy way. Connie looked at his body lying there — was that how he looked when he lay with her? and thought that somebody had to boss, and somebody had to be bossed. It looked like it! she thought ironically. But Parkin managed to be very little bossed.
He got to his feet again, and said quietly:
‘Try her again, Sir.’
Clifford tried her, and Parkin went behind and gave her a gentle shove. She began to move. But Clifford glanced round, yellow with anger.
‘Will you get off there!’ he cried. Then he added, ‘How shall I know what she’s doing—’
Parkin stepped smartly aside, like a soldier. Then, with an air of finality, he began to put his coat on. He was out of it.
The chair began slowly to move backwards.
‘Clifford, your brake’s not on!’ cried Connie, again rushing to the rescue.
But Clifford had pulled a light lever, and stopped the chair. There was a moment’s dead pause all around.
‘It is obvious I am at everybody’s mercy!’ said Clifford.
But this too fell into silence. Clifford was yellow with anger, Constance was silent as was her wont on such occasions, and Parkin was slinging his gun over his shoulder, a peculiar little expression on his face. And the dog Flossie, sitting on her haunches behind her master, moved uneasily, eyeing the chair with great suspicion and dislike, and terribly perplexed among the three human beings.
In the silence, a cock-pheasant bolted across the riding absurdly, streaming his feathers and craning his silly neck. Everybody refused to speak. The tableau vivant remained motionless among the squashed bluebells.
‘I’m afraid I rather lost my temper with the infernal thing!’ said Clifford at last.
‘It is annoying!’ said Constance.
‘Do you mind pushing me home, Parkin?’ said Clifford. ‘And. excuse anything I said,’ he added rather offhand.
‘It’s nothing to me, Sir Clifford!’
Even then, it was not easy to get the chair started, for the brake was jammed. They poked and pulled, and the keeper took off his gun and his coat once more. But Clifford said never a word. At last the keeper lifted the back of the chair bodily, Clifford in it and with a sudden jerk, tried to loosen the wheels, unconscious of everything save his determination to get the thing free. Clifford clutched the sides of the chair in peril, as the chair tilted, but he did not look round. The veins in the keeper’s neck were swollen, something seemed to be going to burst in his body; yet he kept the chair off the ground, and gave another snatching jerk at the wheel. The chair reeled.
‘For God’s sake!’ cried Clifford, in agony.
But the wheel was free, the breath came out of the keeper’s nose like a split tyre, his eyes seemed to be coming out of his head. He stood panting, while the chair leaned against him.
‘Is she free?’ asked Clifford.
‘Ay!’ came the gasp.
Then the keeper looked round. Then he looked at Connie.
‘Bring me that bit of log,’ he panted quietly.
Constance brought the piece of tree-root, and he scotched the chair. Then he went and sat on the bank.
‘I’ll sit down a minute!’ he said, his eyes unconscious because of the beating of his heart, his hands trembling.
Connie looked at him. But she sighed and said nothing. One must boss, the other must be bossed! There seemed a shameful irony in it.
All three were silent. Even the dog was motionless. The back of Clifford’s head did not move. The sky was clouding over.
At last Parkin sighed, and getting a red handkerchief from his coat, blew his nose.
‘It’s a bit of a strain, holding the chair up,’ he said, as he rose to his feet.
‘Quite!’ said Clifford.
To Connie, it seemed wonderful that such sudden strength had come out of the keeper’s body. He was not a powerful man: and lying flat on the floor, poking at the engine, he had looked a bit pathetic, not at all large and burly. Yet that sudden strength could come into him, into his limbs and breast and loins.
He slung on his gun without putting on his coat. ‘Shall I carry your coat?’ she said holding out her hand.
‘I can hang it here, my lady!’ he said, in a low voice, pushing the coat into the handle of the chair. Then he stooped, and pulled out the scotch, putting his body against the chair.
‘Are you ready then, Sir?’ he asked.
‘When you are,’ said Clifford.
The keeper put his weight against the chair: the thing was very heavy, Clifford was a heavy man. But it moved slowly, and slowly, step by step, Parkin pushed it up the hill. He was rather pale, paler than Constance had ever seen him. Constance was angry with Clifford, for not having let him help the engine, while the engine still had some power. She did not like to the sweat on Parkin’s brow, and his face pale. She came suddenly to his side, and putting her hand on the back of the chair, began to push with all her woman’s spasmodic energy. Parkin looked at her, and shook his head. But she nodded her head fiercely.
The chair ran swifter. Clifford looked round.
‘I am helping,’ said Constance in a hard voice, determined and dangerous, ‘I’m afraid Parkin has strained himself.’
‘No, I can manage,’ said Parkin. ‘I’d rather your ladyship left go.’
‘I’ll help to the top of the hill,’ she said, panting already, and shifting her hand till it touched his hand: that was brown, with the veins sticking out. And she thought fiercely: I’m going to sleep with him tonight! — And he, looking at her soft hand, gripped there beside his own, thought: I’m going to have her altogether tonight! — and a queer flamey strength seemed to move deep in his back,
taking away his sense of exhaustion after effort.
Clifford sat still, and neither looked round nor spoke.
At the top of the hill, Constance was glad to let go. It made her heart beat. She walked apart. She had had visions of friendship between these two men. As leave think of friendship between fire and water, or iron and the living flesh.
In the park, Constance wanted to help push the chair, again, but Parkin wouldn’t let her.
‘I’d rather you wouldn’t, your ladyship. It runs easy here.’
So she let him do it alone, sweating and panting, step by step. When the motor was running even a little, it made it so much easier. Now it was a dead weight. And the sky was grey.
Parkin did not speak at all. Clifford made a little conversation with Constance, about Lady Eva, who was at Dieppe, and about Sir Malcolm, who had written to ask whether Connie would drive with him in his two-seater, across France, or should they go by train, or else get Hilda to drive them all the way, all three, in her larger car.
‘I’d really rather go by train,’ said Constance. ‘I don’t like motoring long distances. But I shall do what Hilda wants.’
‘She will want to drive her own car,’ said Clifford. ‘And your father will hate being driven—’
‘I suppose that’s how it will be,’ said Constance.
They came at last to the back door, and Clifford was helped into his house chair.
‘Well, thanks awfully, Parkin, I’m afraid it was harder work than you bargained for. I must have a different sort of motor to that chair. Go to the kitchen and have a drink of beer, won’t you? Do!’ said Clifford, but in a rather forced voice.
‘No, thank you, Sir Clifford! I’ll be getting back to th’ wood.’
He ducked out of his gun, put his coat on, ducked into his gun again, saluted, and was gone. Connie looked at him, but he never looked at her. But she was angry with Clifford, and went upstairs.
Clifford must have known what she felt, for at luncheon he said:
‘I’m afraid I was a bit short with Parkin. But the fellow shouldn’t interfere.’
‘He was only trying to help the chair,’ said Constance.
‘But I don’t want help that I don’t ask for,’ said Clifford.
‘Perhaps the chair did. And it would have been so much easier. I can’t understand you.’
‘I know,’ said Clifford, ‘your sympathy is always with servants and underlings: perhaps because you can feel benign and godlike towards them. But it will do Parkin no harm to sweat a little. Take some of the modern impudence out of him.’
‘Weren’t you impudent to him!’ said Connie rudely.
‘Not as far as I am aware. Of course you, in your zeal for the servant-classes — I had almost said the servile classes — may have detected ill-treatment of the poor downtrodden Parkin. But that is your one weak point.’
‘What is my one weak point?’
‘Your feeling of sympathy and kinship with the servant-class.’
‘And what is the servant-class? Because Parkin sweated and nearly broke a blood-vessel and pushed you home, is he the servant class?’
‘Apparently — or he wouldn’t be in the position of having to do it.’
‘He’d be sitting in your chair with paralysed legs, waiting for you to push him home! I see you doing it, too!’
‘My dear Connie, this promiscuous mixing-up of people’s persons and personalities is at least a little vulgar.’
‘And your ingratitude is very vulgar.’
‘Must I be grateful? I pay the man. Is he to do nothing for me?’
‘Not unless you feel a bit of human gratitude to him.’
‘But my dear child, I’m infinitely obliged to him, as I told him. Would you have me shed a tear over his horny hand, that kind of thing?”
‘I’d have you be aware of people.’
‘And I’d have you a little less aware of that kind of people, and a little more aware of the people who are, after all, of your own sort and class.’
‘Who is of my own sort and class?’ she said, rudely.
‘That you must answer yourself, I suppose. As to myself, I tell you once more, I refuse to have personal emotions about people who do not concern me personally. Parkin is my gamekeeper. Basta! Leave him as such. He is a good gamekeeper. If I started having personal emotions about him, he would become a bad gamekeeper. Therefore leave him alone,’
‘But he’s a man.’
‘What does that mean? He is one of the modern working class, uneducated, of a very, very narrow range of intelligence, extremely limited in outlook, of a similar clumsy and narrow emotional range, in fact, incapable of being anything but what he is, a gamekeeper at two pounds a week. Believe me, a capable man earns money, and two pounds a week is apparently Parkin’s value on the market.’
‘Life is not a market.’
‘Every living thing, and every dead one, comes at last to market and is priced,’ said Clifford.
‘And how much would you fetch?’ asked Connie in amazement.
‘I? I think you know. I am worth about thirty thousand pounds in real estate and —’
‘Oh don’t!’ said Connie. ‘You estimate Parkin’s price as he stands in his shirt, and you yourself claim all Wragby and the rest to give you value.’
‘My dear child, they are mine. They are my shirt, so to speak.’
‘No wonder you have no nakedness, and never did have,’ she said.
‘I prefer you when you are not cryptic — but since it’s one of your few vices—’
‘And you don’t rule,’ she said. ‘People like you are only gaolers who keep people working with threats of starvation if they don’t. I don’t call that ruling.’
He turned away, very angry. But she was perhaps angrier still.
However, she had promised to spend the night with the keeper; that was revenge enough. ‘Every living thing, and every dead one, comes at last to market and is priced.’ — And that settled it. The market value was absolute! The only point was that somebody set the price, and somebody paid it. Well, she herself would pull the labels off. After all, she was the doll in the song, to twist her neck to look at the fellow marked two-and-three, and despise the cheaper colonel on the tin gee-gee.
Or was it that, having got the more expensive ruling fellow, she now wanted to ogle the cheaper serving one? Clifford would have said so.
But she was not going to analyse herself. She had to make her plans for the night. She would have to steal away from the house like a thief, and act a lie, even if she did not tell one. But this did not trouble her. She had long since thought that out. It all was solved by the proverb: what the eye doesn’t see, the heart doesn’t grieve.
She really didn’t want to hurt Clifford’s heart. So she must spare his eye. Because after all, a feeling that comes just because you know something in your mind, is a spurious sort of feeling. If there had been any real bodily connection between her and Clifford, she could not have betrayed him. But there was no bodily connection, none, alas! Therefore why should she start false excitements in him, by telling him things? — or even by letting him suspect? It would be far more cruel to him, than quietly going her own way. Because he knew well, she did not believe in self-immolation, and was not going to practise it, beyond what was necessary.
And she had a real hatred of feelings and emotions which were merely provoked from the mind. If Clifford knew she was going to the gamekeeper, what a night of fever, excitement, pornographic imaginings, and jealous torment for him! If he knew nothing, it would affect him not at all. Therefore let him not know. There is a time to chew, and a time to eschew, the apple of knowledge. She made this joke grimly, in her own mind.
She went downstairs to dinner calmly, with her naïve, demure bearing. Clifford was reading Proust. It was not often he really read seriously any more, but when he did, it was the ultra-modern, so-called futuristic writers, who grouped round Joyce or Proust. In the same way, he no longer cared for his old favour
ite in painting, Renoir, but preferred younger men like Matisse. He called Renoir ‘sweet’ and Cézanne ‘humanitarian’.
Constance, on the other hand, found herself wearied by Joyce and Proust, and only very mildly interested in the clever tricks of Matisse, or, in music, of Stravinsky. There were amusing tricks: but they were still tricks. Clifford, however, being in a certain mood of roused alertness, was immersed in Proust.
‘But doesn’t he weary you at all?’ she asked.
‘Not at all! He stimulates me.’
‘But it is a false stimulant.’
‘Why so?’
‘You said you were stimulated by Ulysses. But you were so drab and irritable later on, and it took all the work of the mines to get you out of it. It is a perverse activity of the will.’
‘My dear Connie, I know your nature is evangelical. Mine, on the contrary, is anarchic. Shall we leave it at that?’
‘You! Anarchic! Why you hate the Russians—’
‘As usual, you speak like an angel and an evangel. I did not say I was a political anarchist. If there is one thing I hate the thought of, it is social or political anarchy. In politics, I want rule, strong, firm rule, to keep the machine of the social order running smoothly. But emotionally, artistically, I am an anarchist; and I enjoy it.’
‘It makes you very dead, really.’
‘There speaks my evangelical little wife.’
‘Quite! There’s no such thing as anarchy, really. It is only spite which makes you pull all the petals off the rose, and arrange them cleverly round a chicken-bone, and call that the true rose, rose of all roses.’
He listened, and suddenly laughed.
‘I like that!’ he said. ‘The stem of the rose is a chicken-bone, and the heart of the rose is the knuckle of the bone, but the petals—’
‘Oh, you stole those from a real rose. That is all that I can see in even the best of anarchistic art. It’s all simulacra, and trimmings round a void, and clever furbelows on an empty skeleton.’
‘Why shouldn’t we get pleasure, even out of that?’ he asked, smiling.
John Thomas and Lady Jane Page 25
